Food Life Hacks for College Students

Well actually, these life hacks will suit anyone. But in college, we all just want to find ways to make our lives easier while we’re on the move. The two things we’re always asking ourselves is:

1. How do we make food quickly and efficiently?

2. and how do we keep food for longer (cause we don’t always eat in)?

If you’ve read the Ketchup packet life hacks, there are a couple of ways you can life hack your ketchup packets that are provided in fast food restaurants. Here’s some more hacks that you can do at home:

1) How to make Oreo milk iced coffee:

I TOTALLY NEED TO DO THIS. Power up your iced latte or iced coffee with, what else but Oreo cookies? Just break up the Oreo cookies (add in the creme centers if you want sweeter coffee) then throw them into ice cube trays and add milk. Freeze them and use them the next time you need a coffee boost. I mean… Oreo Iced latte…

2) Bacon and egg cups (you can substitute bacon with chicken ham or turkey ham).

I’ve tried this before at a camp and it’s totally easy! You can either scramble the eggs just like in the picture or just leave them unscrambled so they come out sunny side up. It’s quite easy to clean too, because it only requires a muffin tin.

3) The Bread Monster:

I mean, if you have a giant loaf of bread just lying around (normally we’d buy sliced bread though), then you can slice it into squares (don’t slice it the whole way through) and fill it with 1/2 cup of melted butter, cheese, spring onions and slices of ham too. Wrap it in aluminium foil and bake it at 180°C for 15 minutes. Then unwrap it and bake for another 10 minutes till the cheese is melted. Makes for awesome finger food.

4) Not only that, it works for potatoes too! Check out The Potato Monster:

Slice a potato (again, don’t slice all the way through, make sure it can still stand up) and drizzle it with olive oil, butter, salt and pepper, then fill it with cheese and sour cream (yes add ham/chicken ham if you want) and bake it at 215°C for 40 minutes.

5) Cookie cutter-shaped pancakes and eggs:

Instead of plain round pancakes, cookie cutters mold the pancake batter into a certain shape and makes them thicker and fluffier. I mean, how cute are these? They won’t run all over the place either.

The same thing for eggs, so you get a nice contained sunny side up. No mess, no hassle, no extra egg bits on the side of the pan and it’s easy to clean too.

6) Share that toaster:

The bread look really cramped, but this life hack toasts one side of each bread while keeping the other side soft. Hey, has anyone tried the grilled cheese toaster method before?

7) How to cut cherry tomatoes (and other hard-to-cut round food):

Just contain the cherry tomatoes in between two lids and slice through. No need to individually cut them anymore! half cherry tomatoes taste super awesome when baked in an oven with a bit of olive oil, pepper and herbs, by the way. Roast them at 200°C for 15 minutes.

8) How to get chips easily from the bag:

Just roll the bottom of the bag so that it stands up. Bonus: the chips get propped up too. If you want to close the bag, just unroll the bottom.

Here’s another way to share a bag of chips without having to stick your hand in the bag:

Bite the center of the bag and tear it in a circle. Super easy to see the contents inside! It wouldn’t work if you’ve got a tiny lunch-sized bag of chips though.

9) Wrap the top of bananas to make them last longer:

Bananas are always tricky. They’re either overripe or underripe and it’s incredibly annoying when that happens. Just wrap the stems with plastic cling wrap to make them last longer.

10) Keep your ice cream soft in the freezer:

I’ve not tried this before, but it looks interesting. I assume the condensation stick to the plastic ziplock bag instead of seeping through the ice cream tub, so that the ice cream stays soft.

Here’s an infographic that shows how long food can be stored. They actually can keep for a long period of time, but we often throw food out cause we don’t know how long they can stand:

Here’s a tip: uncooked food lasts for much longer than cooked food. But food stored in a freezer can actually last for a very long time. I’ve tried cooking and eating beef that was stored in my freezer for two months, and I didn’t get sick after that.
Of course, if you think anything smells weird or bad, just toss it out!

One more life hack that I tried that DOES NOT WORK (who knows, maybe it will for you? Let me know if it does!):

I see this loads of times in different life hacking websites, so obviously I was interested in trying it out. However, I had the stove on high heat, and when I placed a wooden spoon on the top of a pot, it still bubbled over. Even after it simmered down and start bubbling again, it still bubbled over. I’ve tried this several times, so I conclude this to be a failed hack.

Have you tried any of them? Do they work? Got any special food hacks not mentioned here?

– Fari Wu

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